Colonialism was claimed to be a civilizing process. In his ‘apologetic’ history of the conquistadors’ achievements, Bartolomé de las Casas cited Gregory the Great’s decision to send St Augustine to England as a precedent for this. He had clearly read his Bede, and insisted that just because the sixth-century English had practised bestial customs it had not meant they were contemptible: Augustine had been sent to free them from the stigma of barbarianism. So too the peoples of the Americas were to be liberated from vicious primitivism by European morals, manners and learning. The conquistadors had received a papal blessing to legitimize their campaign. They carried copies of the requerimiento drawn up by the eminent jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios, which reassured them that their acts had divine authority. Native inhabitants were expected meekly to submit to it. Of course, what really unfolded was a succession of atrocities: financial and sexual urges supervened on spiritual ones.
Its methods were questionable, but imperial Spain was the chief European power. For the English, trade, diplomacy and conflict were the main routes of contact with this prosperous empire, and Spanish words began in the sixteenth century to percolate through English. Hence, for example, armada, galleon and contraband. So too hammock, from the Spanish hamaca – a necessity for sleeping in hot climates, which struck Columbus as impressively hygienic. For English traders, Spain’s ports were a vital source of goods from the East and the Americas, while Spanish merchants dealt in English textiles.
Given Spain’s might, alliances were crucial, and successive English monarchs grappled with the issue. Henry VIII’s first queen was Catherine of Aragon, and in the early part of their marriage Anglo-Spanish relations prospered. When Catherine experienced difficult pregnancies – of which there were several – Spanish doctors were brought over to examine her. A new bond between the two countries was concluded in 1515, and, although this was unstable, Catherine was able to extend patronage to the Valencian philosopher Juan Luis Vives and to other Spanish humanists. Spanish mystics such as San Juan de la Cruz influenced English poetic taste. More parochially, there was a persistent craving for Spanish fashions – supple gloves and perfume from Cordoba, stiffened bodices, and the hooped dresses known as farthingales (their name a corruption of the Spanish verdugado). But when Henry broke with the Catholic Church in order to annul his marriage, the relationship soured. His only legitimate son, the Protestant Edward VI, was highly educated yet unable to assert himself, and died of tuberculosis aged just fifteen. Edward’s Catholic successor, Mary, who was Henry’s daughter by Catherine, promised to lubricate the relationship through her marriage to Philip II of Spain. English traders felt they had reason to be optimistic, but the wider reaction was xenophobic. The commercial concessions the merchants had hoped to receive from Philip were never granted, and Philip’s resistance stimulated the independent spirit that would animate English ventures in the Americas.
With the accession of Mary’s Protestant half-sister Elizabeth in 1558, and as England’s political alliances looked increasingly fragile, hostilities became inevitable. Elizabeth’s truculent policy in the Spanish-controlled Netherlands and her indulgent attitude towards English pirates provoked wrath abroad. She was rarely quick to make decisions, and may best be characterized as a political survivor rather than as a pioneer. But the complex iconography that grew up around her made her appear at once threatening and vulnerable, and it signalled a change in the temper of the nation. Something that approached a cult of the Queen developed, and the almost religious ceremony that revolved around her seemed an affront to the Roman Catholic celebration of the Virgin Mary.
The ritual veneration of Elizabeth – as the bride of Christ or of the English nation, as God’s own daughter and agent, and as a warrior, phoenix and living saint – was a statement of Protestant allegiance and of patriotism.12 The execution of her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, in February 1587 was seen throughout Europe as a religious gesture, not a punishment for treason: Mary was represented as a martyr, while Elizabeth became the target of violent Catholic invective, which characterized her as a monster, an adulterer and the product of incest. One account of the history of English suggests the temper of the times in a single, made-up sentence that buzzes with Spanish loanwords: ‘The war was fought by trade embargos, as well as by desperados who stormed the barricades with bravado.’13
Linguistically, the Americas were to be the grand stage for confrontations between English and Spanish, and the English adventurers who trampled this stage came from a country that was in the process of discovering its own identity – somewhere in the middle of a triangle bounded by the Church, the monarchy and the political class. Language was instrumental in realizing this national identity, yet was also, as we shall see, an ideological battleground. Those who ventured far abroad were involved in promoting the national consciousness, but also in adding to it. Unlike the Spanish, the English were not conquerors seeking vassals. Rather, they were planters looking for land, supposedly green-fingered and eager to nurture growth. New experiences were cultivated or soaked up, not scythed down. English seafarers adopted many of the Spanish terms for articles found in the New World. After all, the Spanish had got there first. Many of the new words were first recorded by Richard Hakluyt, whose Voyages collected these pioneers’ first-hand accounts. Hakluyt’s writings include what are almost certainly the first mentions in English of the sombrero and the llama – from Spanish and from Peruvian Quechua (via Spanish), respectively – and of Eskimo, which comes from the Abenaki language of the American north-east and means ‘eaters of raw flesh’.
Many sixteenth-century imports from Spanish related to animals (armadillo, mosquito); plants, food and drink (guava, for instance); and places (Carib, El Dorado). Others denoted ranks, types or traits either common in Spain (not just bravado, but also cavalier, grandee, major-domo, miser, padre) or discovered by the Spanish abroad. Spanish clothes made a strong impression (hence not just sombrero, but also cape), and so did their forms of entertainment, such as the guitar and castanets – the latter from a diminutive form of the word for chestnuts, presumably because the instrument made a sound like hard nuts rattling. It is not difficult to imagine the experiences which gave English adventurers the opportunity to absorb words such as peccadillo or hurricane (which was at first, thanks partly to Portuguese influence, spelt furicano). Then there is bizarre, adopted from French but made more popular by its associations with the Spanish bizarro meaning ‘brave’ – a term for its part rooted in the Basque word for a beard, presumably because bearded men were thought to be spirited, all bristle and gristle.
Besides the Spanish, there were contacts with French and Portuguese settlers. These threw up puzzling new words, and many of the terms acquired from Spanish, French and Portuguese had their roots in Native American tongues. Speakers of Arawakan languages were the first indigenous Americans encountered by Columbus, and from these languages the Europeans took words such as iguana, mangrove, mahogany and the already mentioned guava. From Carib came cayman, manatee and peccary, along with yucca and savannah, and from the now-extinct Taino language of Haiti canoe, cassava, maize and papaya. The Spanish also adopted from Taino the word guayaco, the name of a tree which oozed a resin that was believed to have medicinal value. Its first appearance in English, as guaiacum, was in 1533 in a translation by Thomas Paynell of a Latin treatise about the plague; the possibility of finding in the Caribbean and America remedies for common or fatal ailments was to be mentioned time and time again in promotional pamphlets.
Nahuatl was an especially rich source, providing chilli, cocoa (which was believed to cure tuberculosis), coyote, guacamole and peyote. It was also the source of tomato , though initially tomatoes were often called ‘love apples’ on account of their alleged aphrodisiac properties. This may go part of the way to explaining why in Italian the seemingly mundane tomato is called pomodoro, ‘apple of gold’. In Britain and America the fruit’s popularity was slow to rise, because of its less than inviting kinship with
deadly nightshade. Another word acquired via Spanish is avocado, which, thanks to its shape, takes its name from the Nahuatl for a testicle. (The more lovely orchid also draws its name from a word for this part of the body. Here the source is Greek, and again shape is the key: orchid bulbs look alarmingly anatomical.) Buccaneer derives from a French corruption of the Tupí Indians’ name for a method of curing their meat, and Portuguese contact with the Tupí in Brazil yielded cashew, jacaranda, macaw, maraca, piranha, tapioca and toucan. Pizarro’s inroads in Peru explained the Spanish adoption of the Quechua words condor, guano, puma and quinoa, and of the words alpaca and pacay (a pulpy fruit) from the Aymara language spoken by the people living on the plateaux around Lake Titicaca. Jaguar was adopted from one of the several dozen Tupí-Guaraní lowland languages, where it signified nothing more precise than a carnivorous creature. Another discovery was the raintight blanket the Spanish called a poncho, which they appear first to have seen in Peru; British observers, less impressed, were still examining it with somewhat sceptical curiosity in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Encounters with the Portuguese were scattered and less frequent, but led to the adoption of such words as auto-da-fé, assegai (a hardwood spear), marabout (a Muslim African mystic), madeira, albino and yam. As their nature implies, one area of contact was West Africa. The Portuguese had been ‘the first European power to project themselves, and their language, … into the world at large’.14 They had established coastal positions between Cape Verde and Benin, and pepper, ivory, gold and slaves were their chief commodities. In the minds of their European rivals, these strategic footholds were impressive; the fort at São Jorge da Mina, for instance, was ‘a fantasy city of turrets and spires, painted by mapmakers to resemble a sort of Camelot with blacks’.15
English adventurers were not quick to follow the Portuguese example. An early proposal to tap the African market was vetoed by Edward IV in 1482, and it was only in the 1530s that William Hawkins made the first documented English visit to West Africa, on his way to Brazil. Later, Hawkins engineered trade, sending a strange cargo that included nineteen dozen nightcaps in return for a number of elephant tusks. This bounty was sufficiently impressive to inspire at least a dozen English vessels to sail for Guinea between 1553 and 1565. The climate and tropical diseases took their toll on their crews, and those who returned expressed astonishment at the sight of the nearly naked tribesmen. They also noted details of the language these men spoke – a pidgin dotted with Portuguese words.16 But Portuguese was mainly met with later, on the spice-laden fringes of the Indian Ocean, and we must wait to deal with that.
In the Americas, the most inspiring achievement of the Portuguese was the intensive cultivation of sugar, which they had pioneered in Brazil. The English learnt from their example. In the Caribbean, piracy was lucrative; buccaneers moved in swarms, launching audacious raids. The English busied themselves with ‘the collective larceny of Spanish assets’.17 But on land, sugar was the key to English prosperity. It was first planted on Barbados in 1643, and within half a century it covered 80 per cent of the island; refined sugar, molasses (from the Portuguese melaços) and rum (perhaps a West Country word) accounted for almost all Barbados’s exports. As other Caribbean islands were permanently occupied – Antigua, Nevis, Montserrat – the highly profitable sugar cane was planted there too. St Kitts, initially a tobacco island, became an intensive sugar plantation. Jamaica was seized from the Spanish in 1655, and formally ceded in 1671, by which it time it was home to fifty-seven sugar refineries as well as new and fruitful cocoa plantations.18 Much of the cheaply produced rum was ferried to the Gold Coast to be bartered for slaves or even gold. Slaves were vital for the plantations’ development, as the harsh conditions discouraged free men from working there. A plantation of 100 acres needed 150 strong labourers.19 From the Spanish the English took the words negro and mulatto, the latter used of any child fathered by a Spaniard on an African woman, and they borrowed too the Spanish habits of discrimination and subjugation.
When the first English settlers landed on Barbados, in 1627, the party included ten Africans seized from a Portuguese vessel in the Atlantic. Over the next few decades, the numbers swelled. At first the Dutch West India Company dominated the slave trade; then, from 1663, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa muscled in. In 1670 the white population of the West Indies was 41,400, as against a black population of 51,900; fifty years later, the white population had shrunk to 34,200, but the black population stood at 174,700.20 The African experience of Atlantic slavery is captured by Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo enslaved as an 11-year-old and transported to the West Indies and thence to Virginia. In 1789 he published an ‘interesting narrative’ of his life, in which he handsomely conveyed the suffering of slaves, herded like sheep, tortured and raped. Equiano’s book contains what seems to be our first sighting of wrecker, a ship used to salvage sunk or stranded vessels – or, as in Daphne du Maurier’s novel Jamaica Inn, lure them in for looting. The word stands as a symbol of the deviousness of a whole brotherhood of coastal parasites.
The power of Spain, so majestic during the sixteenth century, diminished sharply in the seventeenth. The so-called Revolt of the Netherlands drained Spanish resources, and the vast imports of gold and silver from the Americas triggered crazy inflation. Spanish cargoes were increasingly ferried on foreign vessels, and territories overseas needed constant, expensive protection from the sniping attacks of enemies. The Anglo-Spanish Treaty of Madrid in 1670 confirmed the withering of Iberian power. ‘If Spain in the sixteenth century had furnished the model to be followed,’ writes the historian J. H. Elliott, ‘now in the later seventeenth it was the model to be shunned.’ Spain conceded English ownership of its colonies and dominions in the Caribbean and North America, and, for all that it managed to hang on to its possessions on the American mainland, ‘there was a widespread impression that Spain itself was in terminal decline.’21
Meanwhile English mastery of the seas strengthened. As it did so, the intrepid Englishman became a stock character. A perfect embodiment of the type was the buccaneering William Dampier, who circumnavigated the globe three times and would be characterized by Coleridge in his Table Talk as ‘a rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind’. An observer rather than an analyst, he wrote accurately of his experiences; his A New Voyage Round the World (1697) is an idiosyncratic, evocative account of a series of journeys made between 1679 and 1691. The journeys take in places as far apart as China and Haiti, Chile and Indonesia. Reading Dampier is a bit like immersing oneself in a Patrick O’Brian novel, but there are long passages of assiduous note-taking. Thus ‘The Guava Fruit grows on a hard scrubbed Shrub, whose Bark is smooth and whitish, the branches pretty long and small, the leaf somewhat like the leaf of a Hazel, the fruit much like a Pear, with a thin rind’; and, of the people of New Holland (i.e. Australia), ‘Setting aside their humane shape, they differ but little from Brutes. They are tall, strait bodied, and thin, with small long Limbs. They have great Heads, round Foreheads, and great Brows. Their Eye-lids are always half closed, to keep the Flies out of their Eyes … and therefore they cannot see far.’22
It is in Dampier that we find the first records of several of the phenomena mentioned above, such as avocados and cashews; he is also the first English author we know to provide a proper account of those little sheaths which Willem Piso labelled vanilla, the pods of which he saw being dried in Mexico. He introduced English audiences to the Tamil catamaran, the swift craft he saw off the Coromandel coast, and the barbecue, which derives from the Haitian Taino word barbacoa. Dr Johnson would explain the latter in his Dictionary as ‘a term used in the West Indies for dressing a hog whole; which, being split to the backbone, is laid flat upon a large gridiron, raised about two foot above a charcoal fire, with which it is surrounded’. The process sounds not unlike torture, yet the sacred fire pit was a sign of the Taino culture’s ceremonial relationship with foodstuffs. The process of smoking meat – and the attendant pleasure o
f sitting back and watching it smoke – was known to Europeans long before they voyaged to the New World, but the adoption of this particular word signals a fresh appreciation of the way in which sharing food fosters community.
It was Johnson, too, who wrote in the preface to his Dictionary, more than 150 years after Samuel Daniel’s prescient words, that
Commerce, however necessary, however lucrative, as it depraves the manners, corrupts the language; they that have frequent intercourse with strangers, to whom they endeavour to accommodate themselves, must in time learn a mingled dialect, like the jargon which serves the traffickers on the Mediterranean and Indian coasts. This will not always be confined to the exchange, the warehouse, or the port, but will be communicated by degrees to other ranks of the people, and be at last incorporated with the current speech.
The Secret Life of Words Page 13